I still can not believe it: After four years of intense work, today we are releasing our brand new “ownCloud Infinite Scale” into so called “General Availability”. Everybody can download and use the new, stable ownCloud Infinite Scale now and experience the open source workspace collaboration platform of the future.
We started that motivated by the experience of many years supporting the open source community as well as enterprise customers on ownCloud enterprise file sync and share. Powered by enthusiastic and ambitious ideas to overcome the shortcomings of the PHP based ownCloud- (and derivates) architecture, we started the adventure of a rewrite together with strong partners.
Our diverse community contributed not only ideas, requirements, code, testing, translations and what not, but also supported us all the time and always believed that this new platform will bring something new, innovative and future-proof to the market. That can be used starting today.
In roughly four years, there was not always sunshine. It already starts with the time span of four years – obviously there were ambitious plans to finish it earlier in the beginning. But whoever has written software knows that everything takes longer than expected, and that this is to be explained to those who wait…
To get to this point, we had countless brainstorming sessions to collect ideas, so many discussions to come to the best solutions, loud and quiet interactions between team members spread around the entire globe. There were times where only a small fraction of the team was entitled to work on the new stuff, and times where literally everybody was contributing.
We had management- and team changes, burning CI chains and tooling tortures, planning- and design exercises, wrote great code and deleted it again, in short, we experienced everything that software engineering on this level has to offer.
And of course, there were opinions – opinions like: A system without a database will never work, everything has to run in Kubernetes, Rust is obviously faster, rewrites always fail, agile needs to be done $WHATEVERYOUCANTHINKOF, the team needs to discuss more, the team needs to discuss less and all that. We listened to all of them, or most of them, reflected, learned a lot and moved on.
But let me outline what we are releasing in the next days in a nutshell:
- The Infinite Scale backend, a brand new architected backend component for file sync and share and content collaboration. Written in Golang following a microservices architecture paradigm. Based on REVA, a collaboration platform maintained by the CS3 community which we are proudly part of.
- A brand new web client based on vue.js following latest design and UX principles. Slim, efficient to use and fully accessible.
- Fully compatible desktop-, iOS- and Android clients (soon) which support the new Infinite Scale features and the ownCloud 10 system
- Multiple deployment models for the backend from simple single binary deployment via docker to scaling setups in modern cloud infrastructure
- Complete new admin documentation
To summarize, it was a very exciting time to get to this point. And now a new era starts with ongoing improvements, satisfying the first already existing customers, hunting down bugs and more.
Before I end, I would like to say a big thank you to all who have been involved in this part of the story: The early innovators who were brave enough to even start this project, the community members, our development partner CERN and the CS3 community for their vision, dedication and patience, the Early Adopters who reviewed the progress that we made and tested early unstable releases and the open source community for their contributions. And of course to all the staff of ownCloud who was involved in Infinite Scale – it was a great time until here, and I am very happy to be part of it.
And now the party really starts – with an awesome new platform to build solutions upon.
Getting started with Infinite Scale: https://doc.owncloud.com/ocis/next/quickguide/quickguide.html
